President Hamid Karzai, who has been the only leader in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion brought down the Taliban, will not seek a third term in office, his palace said Thursday.
“The constitution of Afghanistan does not allow anyone to run for the presidency for more than two terms,” the statement quoted Karzai as telling a group of parliamentarians. He “will not try to run for the presidency for the third time”, it said, adding that he was making the announcement in response to “rumours”, without elaborating further.
Some Karzai opponents have long suggested he could try to change the constitution to extend his time in office, amid rocky relations with Western officials in Afghanistan. The announcement comes one day after Karzai handed authority for resolving a long-running row over vote-rigging in last September’s parliamentary elections to the Independent Election Commission. But three years before Afghanistan’s next presidential election is due in 2014, it took many analysts in Kabul by surprise.
It was not immediately clear whether it was connected to the announcement on tackling the row over parliament.
Karzai was sworn in as interim leader of Afghanistan in December 2001, shortly after the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban. In 2004, he won the country’s first direct presidential elections with 55.4 percent of the vote.
But his re-election in 2009 was mired in allegations of corruption, in which challenger Abdullah Abdullah abandoned a second-round run-off and investigators threw out a third of Karzai’s original votes because of fraud.
